Donald Trump, a former president, refuted on Friday claims that he had nuclear weapons-related confidential materials that FBI investigators allegedly sought when they raided his Florida home earlier this week.
Trump’s rebuttal comes in reaction to a Washington Post piece that said that FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday in search of nuclear documents that he might have removed from the White House, citing unidentified “people familiar with the inquiry.” According to The Post, it is still unknown whether the FBI found these specific documents during its search of Trump’s residence or whether the records it was looking for had anything to do with the US or another nation.
Assertions made by Republicans in the days following the search that the FBI is biased against him and may have planted evidence when searching Mar-a-Lago was repeated by Trump on Friday.
In the days following the search, when the FBI carried out a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago as part of an investigation into the alleged improper management of White House data, Trump and the Justice Department engaged in a dispute, which may have contributed to the timing of his remarks. Just a few months after the National Archives and Papers Administration acknowledged it collected 15 boxes of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was not present during the search that led to the seizure of paper documents.
Trump’s lawyers were there when the search took place at Mar-a-Lago, though they have claimed that the FBI placed restrictions on what they could see. One of Trump’s attorneys claimed in comments to the right-wing media source Real America’s Voice that the former president was able to view the search from New Jersey via Mar-a-security Lago’s camera system.
In a statement released on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland stated that the Justice Department would ask a federal court in Florida to unseal the search warrant that was carried out at Mar-a-Lago and that Garland “personally approved.” Later on Thursday, Trump declared that he would support the department’s efforts to unseal the warrant.
Trump and his friends had previously criticized the DOJ for keeping quiet about the search and for withholding the search warrant, which Trump had a copy of and could at any point directly release.
The search warrant and the redacted receipt outlining what investigators discovered inside Mar-a-Lago, which the DOJ decided to make public, may offer insight into the type of records Trump kept at his Florida home as well as any crimes the department may be looking into.
